Golem



The golem is an enemy in Heretic. They are hulking tan humanoids that attack up close with their fists. Nitrogolems are more powerful golems that have an attack where they charge up an aura of flames, and then launch a screaming fire skull that homes in on their victim. Both the regular golem and the nitrogolem come in ghost versions as well.

When golems are killed, a spirit can be seen rising from their exploding corpse. They have a ~33% chance to drop a Wand Crystal, but these are only worth 3 shots (4 on skills 1 and 5) instead of the usual 10 (15 on skills 1 and 5).

Description of golem from the manual: These big bad walking rocks smack you hard and make you cry.

Description of nitrogolem from the manual: Enchanted by the powers of evil, the Nitrogolems cast blazing skulls at their foe.

Tactical analysis
While not as strong as the sabreclaw, the golem's melee attack seems to be more powerful than the sabreclaw's one.

Data
Data not listed is the same as for the golem.


 * 1) These tables assume that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, impact animations, backfire checks, and smoke trails are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: counterattacks and AI pathfinding must be handled, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
 * 2) Hardcoded exception to infighting negates damage (excepting indirect damage caused by exploding puff pods).

Appearance statistics
In the IWADs the golem is first encountered on these maps per skill level:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of golems per skill level:

The golem ghost is first encountered on these maps:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of golem ghosts:

In the IWADs the nitrogolem is first encountered on these maps per skill level:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of nitrogolems:

The nitrogolem ghost is first encountered on these maps:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of nitrogolem ghosts: